Happy New Year 2014 everyone! This year marks a special anniversary – I started the business in 1984, so that makes 30 years of building musical instruments. It feels that each year has been better than the previous one, and I hope it’ll stay that way in the future as well. Thank you very much to all the Kumu customers!

In May I’ll be going to exhibit Kumus in the US for the first time, I’ll be heading for the Chicago Drum Show (17th and 18th of May). It’s the world’s largest and longest-running event displaying custom and vintage drums, now taking place for the 24th time. It’s really nice to make a visit to the home country of the drum set, with Finnish drums.

The VintageFlat drum shell I developed last year has turned out to work really well, making it a great addition to the other Kumu shell options. The unique wide and flat bearing edges result in a truly distinctive sound, which has already got a number of fans.

A good-quality, great-sounding Kumu video – which had been in the pipeline for a long time – was finally shot last year, too. We got so much footage that there’ll be at least six separate videos coming up. A good friend of mine, Sami Kuoppamäki, demoed more than twenty different Kumu snare drums and also the new VintageFlat set, and all of them can be seen and heard on YouTube. It’s a nice and easy way to compare snare sounds, go have a look.